T. Boone Pickens

T. Boone Pickens (born May 22, 1928, Holdenville, Oklahoma, U.S.—died September 11, 2019, Dallas, Texas) was an American businessman who, after founding his own company in the 1950s, amassed a personal fortune as a petroleum executive. In the 21st century, however, he reinvented himself as an unlikely advocate of using a mix of natural gas and renewable sources, in particular wind power, to meet the United States’ energy needs.

When Pickens was a child, his family moved to Amarillo, Texas. After graduating from high school, Pickens attended Texas A&M University for one year before transferring to Oklahoma A&M College (now Oklahoma State University). He graduated in 1951 with a geology degree and then took a job with Phillips Petroleum, where his father worked as a lawyer.

In 1954 Pickens began his own oil and gas company, Petroleum Exploration Inc. In the late 1950s he also formed Altair Oil & Gas Company, a firm dedicated to oil exploration in western Canada. Subsequently, Petroleum Exploration became Mesa Petroleum and met with great success. Pickens also introduced the innovation of the royalty trust for oil and gas, in which oil or gas wells are owned by a trust and another company manages the actual operation of the well. Royalty trusts lower the amount of taxes investors have to pay. By the early 1980s Mesa Petroleum had become one of the largest oil companies in the United States.

In that decade Pickens gained notoriety for launching several corporate takeover bids against big oil companies. Although many of these attempts were ultimately unsuccessful, they earned Pickens and his company huge profits. Pickens was often accused of “greenmail,” buying shares in a target company so that the company’s management would buy the stock back at a higher price to avert a takeover. Because of his takeover attempts, Pickens is often cited as one of the key figures in the 1980s “shareholder revolution,” which popularized the idea that a company’s primary purpose is to maximize the value of its shares for the benefit of the company’s shareholders.

Pickens left Mesa Petroleum in 1996 and soon started Pickens Fuel Corporation (reincorporated as Clean Energy the next year), which focused on natural gas. In 1997 he founded a hedge fund, BP Capital Management, that specialized in energy. He was one of the main donors to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an organization that claimed 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had not been truthful about his service in the Vietnam War.

Although Pickens became wealthy from his oil and gas ventures, he dedicated himself in the 21st century to finding an alternative fuel source so that the United States would not have to rely on foreign oil. In 2008 he developed the Pickens Plan, an energy proposal that included the use of wind power to provide electricity throughout most of the United States and a reallocation of natural gas reserves from power plants to vehicle use. At the same time he also began a huge media campaign to convince the public that his alternative energy plan was in the country’s best interest. Pickens’s wind farm plans collapsed partly because of high costs of the transmission lines that would have to be built and partly because the financial crisis of 2007–08 caused a collapse in the price of oil. (The Pickens Plan assumed oil would remain above $80 a barrel.) Nevertheless, he remained committed to furthering the use of natural gas in vehicles.

Pickens’s other companies included Mesa Water, which bought the rights to underground water in the Texas Panhandle. Looking to the future, Pickens hoped to one day pump the much-needed water hundreds of miles to Dallas and other drought-prone Texas cities lacking their own resources; however, such plans were deemed uneconomical, and Mesa Water sold its rights in 2011 to the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, which manages water for Lubbock, Amarillo, and other Panhandle cities. He was the author of three memoirs: Boone (1987), The Luckiest Guy in the World (2000), and The First Billion Is the Hardest (2008).